There's a Harry Potter exhibition in London and yes, it's magical

Bit keen on magic, are you? Got a bit of a soft spot for a bespectacled wizard by the name of Harry Potter? SAME. So, I imagine you’ll be pleased to hear that there’s a brand new Harry Potter exhibition opening at the British Library. It is legit enchanting, let me tell you that much. The library’s actually sold a record number of advance tickets – 30,000! – so it’s safe to say we’re not alone in our continued devotion to the boy wizard and his magical antics.

Allow me to set the scene. It begins in a dark sort of antechamber, with books hanging from the ceilings, J.K. Rowling interviews playing on loop and Jim Kay artwork on the walls. You descend a set of stairs and turn a corner at the portrait of Dumbledore in purple to enter the Potions room. Look up and you’ll notice hovering cauldron lights. Look back down again, a 3000-year-old cauldron that washed up from the River Thames in 1861. Straight ahead, in a glass cabinet, an annotated draft of scenes from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – just one of many offensively good personal items donated by J.K. Rowling herself.

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J.K. Rowling dropped by the exhibition on Tuesday this week, by the way, and apparently she loved it. The curators are still trembling with happiness. J.K. Rowling has hand-picked and donated some of her early handwritten drafts, sketches and typed-up notes from across the Harry Potter series. Delightfully, you’ll find them among all the other seriously cool artefacts on loan from magnificent-sounding places like the Museum of Witchcraft. It’s that museum, just so you know, that kindly loaned the British Library a “mermaid corpse” from 17th Century Japan, which is technically a monkey’s body with a fish’s tail (that kind of thing was all the rage at the time). It sits next to a deleted scene from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, in which J.K. Rowling originally wrote that Ron and Harry drove the Weasleys’ flying Ford Anglia into the lake at Hogwarts, where they encountered mermaids. Instead, of course, they ended up smack-bang in the middle of the Whomping Willow.

Each section of the exhibition is named after a class taught at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There's Potions, Alchemy, Herbology, Charms, Astronomy, Divination, Care of Magical Creatures, Defence Against the Dark Arts. You basically get to find out where J.K. Rowling got all her magical inspiration, and how much of her world was based on real-life magic, folklore and mythology. There’s Nicholas Flamel’s actual, real tombstone, because he was an actual, real guy – he lived in Paris and made his fortune in property but when he died in 1418, rumour was that he had discovered the Philosopher’s Stone (and so, was he even dead at all?). There’s a six-metre-long scroll, by the way, called Ripley’s Scroll, which details the alchemy behind the famous stone, and it is one of the exhibition’s proudest pieces. You’ll also find some proper old manuscripts that mention the basilisk and the phoenix, an interactive globe that tells you where Draco Malfoy, Remus Lupin and Bellatrix Lestrange get their names, the oldest cosmology chart on record, a divination and palmistry pamphlet, a fourth century Greek wishing charm, a very good joke about an invisibility cloak and a 1900s garden gnome that would have delighted Arthur Weasley. And so much more.

Harry Potter: A History of Magic is nothing short of wonderful. It’s on at the British Library till 28th Feb 2018, before it absconds to New York City. Run along and see it, if you can.